As an English scholar inexplicably reading The Waste Land for the first time at 25, my encounter with it was one loaded with admiration for its lasting influence. The ways that Eliot appropriates language to embody both individual and collective experiences in the midst and aftermath of World War I is often moving, sometimes disorienting, always powerful. Part I, “The Burial of the Dead,” is littered with personal anecdotes and dialogue. Eliot produces a collage effect as he blurs the lines between pronouns, paradoxically highlighting the interiority of human experience while also making it more universal. By making little distinction between the “I”s, “you”s, and “we”s, it feels like all experience can become your own through reading the poem, while the inviolability of the self remains intact. This paradox seems to sum up at least partially the essence of modernism and the Lost Generation, in a way; they remain united by shared experience even as they become increasingly aware of the inevitability of isolation.

Eliot’s abundant use of allusions to canonical and obscure texts further stresses this need to draw from other people in order to highlight the uniqueness of the self. By employing such a wide variety of texts, Eliot creates a new one entirely its own. He even resorts to re-appropriating his own language in Part IV, “Death by Water.” This use of words evokes the idea that experience is cyclical, even as it is being forever created anew—the world is constantly changing, yet nothing ever really changes because the human is always alone with himself. The drift in and out of other consciousnesses, other languages, only provides a temporary reprieve from the unflinching presence of one’s own reality. At least, that’s how it felt encountering The Waste Land at 2am for the first of many readings to come.